ellen bell

I was to meet my great aunt for lunch today and decided to take an early bus into Oslo. I wanted to sit in a certain cafe in Frogner, to draw, read and think.

It was a cold morning and I drank the hot, milky coffee gratefully. The cafe was busy: the door continually opening and closing, letting in the sharp, bitter air. I had taken a small book with me - Ted Hughes' Poetry in the Making. A slim volume, written for a young audience, in which Hughes' shares his thoughts on writing poetry. He writes clearly and openly without a trace of condescension.

I have been thinking much about what it is to live a creative life. How it can be done? How one can live authentically but well? In her book Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 (Penguin, 2003) Virginia Nicholson wrote:

'Fifty years on we may judge that Dylan Thomas' poverty was noble.....but a minor artist with no money goes as hungry as a genius. What drove them to do it? I believe that such people were not only choosing art they were choosing the life of the artist. Art offered them a different way of living, one that they believed more than compensated for the loss of comfort and respectability.'

I am not completely convinced by her argument - particularly as I now approach my fiftieth year. I think most creatives would be more than happy to welcome in wealth, abundance and security as part of the deal - after all, in our society such things are measurable symbols of success and appreciation, and ones that are recognised by even the most philistinic of us to be so. Poverty is only noble in the abstract. Those discomforting pricks of shame that accompany the artistic practice that goes unrecognised and unpaid for grow more and more distinct as time moves on, those family comments about 'proper jobs', 'real world' and 'being realistic' becoming ever more strident. Financial success becomes the only thing that will hush the clamour.

My aunt was an opera singer. She gave up singing in her forties and became a doctor's secretary. She wasn't strong enough, she told me today, to stand up to her family's resistance. She was lauded for her voice by the Head of Covent Garden, and yet her father only went to see her perform once, her brothers, never. There is no bitterness. She is proud of what she achieved and retells the stories over and over again and with each retelling a flame ignites somewhere behind her eyes.

No, poverty is not noble. Nor, do I believe it is ever consciously chosen over abundance (unless part of a religious quest, I suppose). There are many stories: the science fiction writer Philip K Dick who at times didn't even have the money for the 'late fees' for a library book, or Edgar Allan Poe's wife who, at her death only had his old army coat and their cat for warmth, the artist Gwen John eking out a meagre living posing for Rodin and of course Van Gogh, infamously only selling one painting throughout his lifetime. We live vicarously through these myth-ridden creatives. There is no glory in such scrabbling.

Hughes writes about the 'nobility' of the process - though he doesn't use that word. It is all and it is nothing. Such is life. To write, to create, is to announce that one is alive, one has a voice and wishes to connect, to communicate with another. I am. I exist. I feel this, I have seen this, listen to my story. Tarry awhile with me. To Hughes it was 'vital'. To keep this 'vitality' breathing when one's time is taken up with 'a proper job' is a tough thing. Some can do it - T. S. Eliot worked as a teacher and a banker before becoming the editor at Faber and Faber, Philip Larkin worked as a librarian, whereas others, like Gaugin, who gave up his life as a tax inspector, need to throw off the outer skirts of respectability.

I don't think that there is a right or wrong answer. We are more often than not at the mercy of our histories, our own inner romances. I certainly am. Maybe it is about managing the constant see-sawing - the up and down, the flying and the clunking down (I still have such a vivid memory of the smell of metal on my palms after playing on the see-saws in Knutsford playground). Artists, I think, most want time. Time is so precious and it is that which we battle with - to give up time to something, to work, that is not using the best of us well, that is a sacrifice indeed.